Posted
by
Zonkon Sunday October 21, 2007 @07:09AM
from the putting-a-lid-on-free-speech dept.

slashqwerty writes "Unsatisfied with the proprietary copyright filter Google recently unveiled, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has called for an industry standard to filter copyrighted material. Mr. Dauman has the backing of Microsoft, Disney, and Universal. 'They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies,' he noted. 'Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems.' How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites?"

One day, maybe in the not too distant future, there will be an article on/.

It will read like this:

Your Rights Online: [slashdot.org] MPAA admit that everything they have said for the last 5 years has been a practical jokePosted by kdawson on Tuesday Cantrembember 75th @ 27:00from the i-knew-it departmentAnonymous Coward writes:

"The lawsuits, the absurd DRM, the crazy "the entire industry is going to collapse" rhetoric - we never believed any of this crap", said a spokesman. "What actually happened was someone suggested that perhaps we could somehow start announcing these ridiculous ideas, record the reaction then release it as a movie. Kind of like The Truman Show [imdb.com], only much much bigger."

Has the MPAA finally gone too far? Will this lead to their ultimate collapse? Quiver with excitement. Tremble with fear. Eat peanuts with raisins.

And furthermore, that protection shall apply ONLY to that material worthy of protection under Article I, Section VIII, specifically, that such material promotes the progress of Science of the USEFUL Arts.